AWIS 40th Anniversary Meeting, Session Summary

UPDATE: TO BE PUBLISHED

The Frontiers in Sustainability Panel at the AWIS 40^th anniversary conference consisted of three speakers, all from different areas of environmental science.

The first speaker, Ms. Kristen Graf, is the Executive Director of the Women of Wind Energy organization (WoWE). Ms. Graf started out as an engineering major intent on developing wind technology, but realized the technology itself is already developed. However, fossil fuels and nuclear energy still dominate the generation of electricity over renewable energy sources. The relative proportions of nonrenewables and renewables have actually remained fairly stagnant even with all of the media buzz and politicking surrounding renewables. This has happened despite wind power growing in popularity worldwide. Puzzlingly, this stagnation has occurred despite the increase in wind turbine production in the U.S. So why is this?

A classic experiment, explained

Suppose you send a loved one on a small errand. Take out the trash. If you are concerned about his or her propensity to dawdle, it’s easy to calculate his or her average speed to acquire solid evidence. Just take the distance to the curb, multiply by 2 to account for the “to” and “from” portions of the trip. Divide this result by the total time it took and you’ll get the average speed. (If the result is comparable to the land speed of a box turtle, you are in the clear to berate your loved one.) In 1849, Armand Fizeau used this same principle to calculate the speed of light directly: He reflected light off of a mirror a fixed distance away and timed the round trip. This was the first measurement of the speed of light on Earth.

While Fizeau used the same method to calculate the speed of light, it wasn’t quite so easy.

NY = LA, more or less?

This was an exercise (at least the first few paragraphs were) for the Santa Fe Workshop I attended in May.

Geoffrey West wants to let us in on a little-known tidbit. New York and Los Angeles are basically the same city. You probably think that’s preposterous. New York is the land of the subway, L.A. is the land of the freeway. New York has city lights in the nights, L.A. has sunshine-drenched days. They’re different.

West audaciously gives us an additional morsel. Their sameness can be mathematically proven. Now you’re tempted to use this paper to line the birdcage. How could something as human as a city, in all its qualitative complexity, be quantitatively characterized?